


A Discussion on Origins

by The_Carnivorous_Muffin



Series: Lily and the Art of Being Sisyphus [8]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe, Character Study, Female Harry Potter, Friendship, Gen, Master of Death Harry Potter, Mystery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-21
Updated: 2018-08-21
Packaged: 2019-06-30 10:26:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,501
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15749808
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Carnivorous_Muffin/pseuds/The_Carnivorous_Muffin
Summary: It's Sunday and Wizard Lenin and Lily are visiting the mysterious uncle Death but Wizard Lenin decides to spend this particular Sunday making the mysterious Death less of a mystery.





	A Discussion on Origins

There were many things he left unsaid.

 

He did not speak often of the world he had left behind on boarding the train, a few details, an overarching history to the more than eager Lily but nothing substantial or detailed. That world, overwritten and gone as it was, no longer existed for him. It was less than purgatory and while a part of him would always mourn it he would not speak of it.

 

He hinted, he made reference, but he did not tell.

 

He could though he could spin a tale more intricate and woven than Scheherazade before a king, she had lasted a thousand and one nights, he could spin a story for a thousand years and more until all the suns burned out and the planets turned to wasteland.

 

For the most part Lily didn’t ask, her own life seemed hectic enough, and as much as she questioned certain aspects of reality others she accepted without a blink. She had never questioned that the man she had met in the train station between worlds was Death, had never questioned that he was from another universe and that she was the Death of her own, for her these were the simple truths that defined existence while others were called into question.

 

In the end it was the horcrux of Tom Riddle that she referred to as Lenin who would ask.

 

Lily had come again, relaying the latest stories of the week, which with her increased activities as a magical drug lord had become quite a bit more bizarre and violent as the years had progressed. He was never entirely certain how he felt about that, the small part of him that still liked to believe he was human recoiled from the idea of a young girl as a gangster, but for the most part he simply failed to picture it and realized that even if he could he had no true control over her. In his own world there had never been a Lily Riddle so he could not begin to see her face.

 

“You know, we always sit at the same table.” She noted eyeing the table with a raised eyebrow, “I mean, it’s a nice table, but I just realized that it’s always the same one.”

 

This was true but to him it had become something of a tradition, to bring out tea and regard the station at the same café table, something that held him together when there was nothing but himself and the idea of King’s Cross.

 

“Would you like to change tables?” He asked to which she shook her head.

 

“No, these ones all sort of look the same anyway… I think I want to check out the scene of Lenin’s destruction, I just realized I never actually saw the damage up close. Remember, from when he burned down a couple shops a few years back because he was depressed that the great revolution was falling to pieces without his leadership.”

 

Next to her Wizard Lenin, dressed in one of his more simple communist outfits consisting of a red scarf, a black hat with a small red star in the middle, sighed as he flipped through a little red book presumably containing quotations from the Chinese Chairman Mao inside, “I would appreciate it if you didn’t bring that up.”

 

It was said without any real enthusiasm as if he had come to accept that he really couldn’t convince Lily to do anything and that the most he could do was suggest other alternatives that she might like to pursue instead.

 

He stopped at a page and looked up at Lily with raised eyebrows, “I don’t remember Mao ever saying, ‘damn the torpedoes and death to the infidels.”

 

“It’s the sentiment that counts.”

 

He frowned slightly at that for a few moments before asking with more exasperation than Death had ever imagined possible in any aspect of Voldemort, “Don’t you have arson scenes to look at?”

 

“Oh, right, I’ll be back.” With that Lily ran off leaving the two of them alone, the horcrux Lenin flipping through the little red book and Death watching him while pouring himself more tea.

 

Things were more relaxed between them than they had been initially, Lily’s horcrux was not Harry’s or close to any Tom Riddle he had known in his universe, as the years passed they had grown tolerant of each other if not slightly fond. Unwilling as it was they did have a connection with each other, they were both removed from the greater reality with only Lily as their guide, both were forced to value her and hold her close to themselves for fear of isolation, and because of that they were the only ones who truly came close to understanding her.

 

So when Lily sauntered off towards the shards of broken glass and charred remains of buildings they did not immediately come to blows as they perhaps would have done on their initial meeting.

 

Under his breath the horcrux muttered as his eye caught on a particular passage, “Long live Chuck Norris, slayer of capitalist demons… It’s amazing that she even tries to pass this off as someone else’s words.”  

 

He closed the book with a sense of finality leaving it on the table, with a raised eyebrow he looked across at Death and said, “You wouldn’t believe the things you can find in her brain.”

 

He glanced over at Lily who was kicking at the charred wood that had been in the shop window with her foot and watching as it crumbled into soot.

 

“I suppose I can guess a few, is Chuck Norris involved?”

 

The horcrux gave a sharp laugh, “Oh Mr. Norris is only the beginning, it’s unimaginable if you have never been. I pity the fool who tries to use legilimency against her.”

 

There was a slight pause where they regarded each other in the few rare moments where there was no malice in either’s expression. It was a comfortable silence, the kind he had so dearly missed later in his existence, a thoroughly human silence where nothing needed to be said at all and you could just sit and be.

 

It was interrupted by a soft question from the horcrux, “How did you realize you were Death?”

 

“Hm?”

 

The man had such blue eyes, he had only seen Voldemort’s red eyes in his world it had been too dark in the Chamber of Secrets to see Tom Riddle’s, but he did not think they were as blue as this version’s. They were so pale and so very sharp, so that even when he was merely staring at you they seemed to cut through you, there was always a sense of danger to him of something refined and whetted until it was lethal merely by touch. Even in his softer moments, where he asked a simple question and only curiosity was evident in his expression he cut.

 

“You said that you were never told you were Death, not like Lily was by you, and that you had to figure it out for yourself. It doesn’t seem an intuitive conclusion to draw, to call oneself Death, and I was wondering how you came to it.”

 

He did not speak often of worlds left behind, of trains taken and not taken, and of barren moons staring down at the tundra where only the idea of a man stood screaming at the abyss.

 

“That is a very long story.” He finally said quietly and in his mind he saw Harry Potter, what he had so desperately tried and failed to be, and as usual it caused the distant pangs of nostalgia where he only wished that he had known sooner.

 

“Being an incorporeal spirit trapped in another dimension it appears I have nothing but time.”

 

That caused a slight smile on Death’s features, “Very well, I suppose I can summarize. There was never any particular moment where I realized what I was, epiphanies are as rare as they are sudden, life is not quite as dramatic as that.”

 

He paused, unsure of where to begin, to bring up the Peverells and the story of three brothers, Lily Evans and James Potter, October 31 1981 and the Potter massacre, or to start hundreds of years later when he first claimed the title for himself. The never-ending story was infinite in both directions it both failed to end and to begin; it made choosing a starting point more than a little difficult.

 

“In my universe I am Lily, I was born July 31 1980 as Harry James Potter son of Lily Evans and James Potter. Similar events to the ones in yours happened October 31 1981, my parents were murdered in cold blood, and I was left a survivor of the curse that leaves nothing living.

 

I start here because it was the first notable event that led me to question my existence. Albus Dumbledore would tell me later that it was my mother’s love that protected me, but I never truly believed it, and it was always this incident more than any other that I would return to for evidence.”

 

He paused and took a sip of tea, the scent of jasmine sitting on his tongue, thinking how best to continue before starting again, “I was killed many times throughout my childhood, although I did not realize it. I had been poisoned by a basilisk, devoured by dementors, probably broken my neck in quidditch more than once, killed again by the killing curse, and so many others I probably can’t even remember.

 

I always wrote them off, I desperately desired to be a normal human being.

 

You probably can’t even process the thought, the desire to be average and unnoticeable, but I always have even much later I never wanted to be extraordinary or somehow inhuman. I clung to Harry James Potter with a grip that was much too tight, desperately tight.”

 

The horcrux didn’t comment on Death’s observation, simply took a sip of his own tea and motioned for Death continue the story. It was so difficult to picture this calm man as Voldemort, devoid of any raging or screaming, this was the man who sat in the room and plotted and when he spoke it was quiet but it rang through the halls until every man heard it. Over the years Death almost had to remind himself to associate this Tom Riddle, this Lenin, with Voldemort.

 

“As I grew to be an adult I stopped aging, I’m not entirely sure why this is, perhaps after the last killing curse I had subconsciously decided that I should stop then, at eighteen years old. That this was somehow the end for me and that I truly should have died in that forest clearing. Either way I grew older and yet I didn’t, I remained eighteen years old, a gawky school boy with glasses and everyone noticed. That was when I truly started to suspect and to think about what it meant to be Harry James Potter and if Harry James Potter existed at all.

 

At first I thought I was the Master of Death, I had collected all three hallows when I was eighteen, and had destroyed two of them. I thought that somehow, by merely possessing all three for a moment, I had become the Master of Death.

 

It’s easier to be simply the Master of Death than to be Death itself.

 

I thought that for some time, and there was no real thing that convinced me that this was incorrect, simply living and dreams I’d occasionally have. Those flashes to the distant past where thoughts weren’t quite thoughts and eternity seemed so tenable.

 

I suppose what would convince me the most was that I never met a Death that I was supposed to be the master of. There was never any cloaked mysterious figure or even a being made of magic who would appear and bow before me as if I was a lord. Instead there was only me and my power which seemed to be infinite and my life which seemed eternal. More and more humanity seemed like a form I’d taken for convenience, I improved my eyesight with a thought, I grew taller and leaner, I took the form I felt it best for me to take simply because I could. Human sensations drifted from me so that by the time I left Earth I could no longer recall what most things had felt like.

 

A Master of Death is still simply a man, he’s just a man who has more power than most, I was no longer a man. No, I was never a man.”

 

After he ended there was silence, the clinking of their tea against the table and Lily off in the distance poking at the remain of things long since wasted away. The remains of the idea of King’s Cross Station, left for all eternity to glitter in the artificial lighting.

 

He couldn’t remember if he had ever told his origins before, Lily had never asked beyond learning his name was Death, and it had taken him many meetings for him to be comfortable enough with the horcrux to dispense details like Harry Potter. The trouble was that it was misleading, so very misleading, to talk about his birth and his parents and things that only vaguely applied to him in that he gave them to himself. It was an illusion so clever that even in the telling it was blinding, it was best to keep the idea of himself vague, to remain a nameless concept. It  was the most accurate at the end of things.

 

“I can’t say that’s what I expected.” The horcrux finally commented with slightly narrowed eyes, thoughts seeming to turn in his head unvoiced, perhaps one day he would bring up this conversation of a Harry James Potter again but it would not be now and not the next Sunday either. If he had learned one thing over the years about Lily’s friend Lenin it was that he was very patient and would wait as long as he felt he needed to and as he had pointed out spectral beings as they were they had nothing but eternity to entertain themselves with.

 

“It is the abridged version, there are many more details, but they are details and they would bore you.” He said with a wave of his hand, brushing aside all the years and feelings and things that Tom Riddle would never need to know

 

The words unsaid sat heavily in the air between them and it was only after a lengthy pause that the horcrux returned to the red book on the table and began from where he left off, “Now, this one just says, ‘Khan’, but with a lot of a’s in the middle and in capital letters…”

 

And in the distance Lily nudged the ruins of an illusion as if it was truly the wreckage of a shop.

**Author's Note:**

> Another 100th review fic of "Lily and the Art of Being Sisyphus" this time on Wizard Lenin and Death discussing Death's origins.


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